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12 November 2020

Special: Superhuman Part II - Designing Software to Feel like a Game (with Rahul Vohra)

7Frameworks
11Insights

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Frameworks in this episode

Communication5 steps

Behavior Then Feeling: The Feedback Formula

Describe what a camera would see, then name the exact emotion it caused.

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Innovation4 steps

Game Design, Not Gamification

Only layer rewards onto an experience that is already fun without them.

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Innovation6 steps

Nuanced Emotional Design

Pick an exact sub-emotion from an emotion wheel, then design the moment that evokes it.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Test the Feature Before You Build It

Validate a risky feature with SQL queries and emails instead of feature code.

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Innovation6 steps

The Five Lenses of Game Design for Software

Design any product experience through goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow.

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Innovation5 steps

The Fun Stack

Interrogate the words game, toy and fun until you have a real design target.

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Innovation4 steps

The Inspiration Question

Turn your most unshareable peak experience into the product's unifying theme.

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Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Hot Take· 1

Hot Take

Why Bushnell's Law Is Necessary But Not Sufficient

Ben raises the classic Nolan Bushnell definition of a good game: easy to learn, difficult to master. Vohra accepts it but calls it necessary and not sufficient, arguing you could list hundreds of attributes with no minimal subset. Bushnell's Law covers goals and mastery, but says nothing about how you feel while playing, the nature of the interaction, the childlike wonder of a toy, or flow.

  • Bushnell's Law: a good game is easy to learn, difficult to master
  • Vohra: necessary but not sufficient — it only covers goals and mastery
  • It ignores emotion, controls, toys and flow
  • Flow is the factor he considers among the most important
  • Great games draw on psychology, mathematics, storytelling and interaction design

“I think that is necessary, but not sufficient.”

“You really do have to draw upon the art and science of all kinds of fields, whether it's psychology, mathematics, storytelling, interaction design, when it…”

#game design#definitions#flow

Explainer· 3

Explainer

How Superhuman Beat Google's Search Speed Inside the Browser

To be faster than a company with a server within two miles of everyone, Superhuman had to download, store and index essentially all of your email inside the browser itself. Searches then run remotely on Gmail and locally at the same time, with results merged live. Vohra says it took nearly two years, and describes merging two infinite lists on screen without pop-in as a genuinely hard computer science problem.

  • The browser version is faster than any native email experience
  • Electron alone does not give you local full-text search
  • Local and remote searches run simultaneously and merge in real time
  • Roughly two years of work to download, store and index mail client-side
  • Merging two infinite lists without pop-in is the hard part
  • Contrast with Outlook's separate 'continue searching on server' button

“this took nearly two years of time to figure out how to download, store, and index the email in the browser”

“How do you merge two infinite lists on the screen without having things like pop-in?”

#search#performance#engineering#electron
Explainer

They Reverse-Engineered Chrome's Font Engine for a Perfect Baseline Grid

Vohra wanted every element to line up on vertical rhythm, which is effectively impossible with basic web programming once you mix fonts, graphics and varying sizes. The team read the Chrome source, reverse-engineered the font layout engine, and built their own layout framework entirely in CSS for speed. A tool ingests a font, emits its metrics, and generates the CSS automatically.

  • Goal was everything aligned to a six or eight pixel vertical grid
  • Built the layout framework in pure CSS to keep it fast
  • A tool extracts ascender, x-height, cap height and descender metrics per font
  • Both superhuman.com and the app sit on a subpixel grid
  • Command K baseline turns the grid on as a visible Easter egg

“We dove into the Chrome source code, reverse-engineered the font layout engine, and then built our own layout framework, actually entirely in CSS, because we…”

“if they hit Command K baseline, I believe this is an internal tool, but I think it is exposed to users, it will actually turn…”

#typography#css#design engineering#easter eggs
Explainer

The 1970s Stanford Study Where Gold Stars Halved Kids' Drawing Time

Vohra recounts the Stanford research that underpins his scepticism of rewards. Children aged three to four who already liked drawing were split: some were promised a certificate with a gold seal and ribbon, others were told nothing. All drew for six minutes. Observed over the following days, the children who had expected a reward spent only 8% of their time drawing — the extrinsic reward had halved their motivation.

  • Participants were three- and four-year-olds who already enjoyed drawing
  • One group was promised a certificate with a gold seal and ribbon
  • All children drew for six minutes in a separate room
  • Rewarded children later spent only 8% of free time drawing
  • The reward roughly halved intrinsic motivation

“Back in the 1970s, researchers from Stanford, they'd recruited children, these were young kids, they were aged about three to four years old.”

“they only spent 8% of their time drawing. In other words, the extrinsic reward had literally halved their motivation.”

#motivation#psychology#research

Story· 5

Story

He Learned to Code at Eight Because the BBC Micro Started With B

With both parents working late as doctors, Vohra spent afternoons in the school library. Having finished the fiction section he started on non-fiction and reached the coding books quickly, because the dominant UK computer was the BBC Microcomputer and the shelf was alphabetical. The books were written for children, so every motivating example was building your own game.

  • Started programming around age eight, purely to make games
  • Found the coding shelf early because 'BBC' begins with B
  • Children's coding books used game-building as the teaching example
  • Claims roughly 10,000 hours of programming by age 18
  • Went on to study computer science at the University of Cambridge

“the predominant computer at the time in the United Kingdom was the BBC microcomputer. Fortunately, the word started with B, otherwise my life would have…”

“the very reason I learned how to code, and I started when I was about eight years old, was just so that I could make…”

#origin story#programming#childhood
Story

RuneScape Ran in Every School Browser on a Rewritten Java Object Model

Vohra's first professional game design job was at Jagex, creator of RuneScape, then the world's largest free online role-playing game. Jagex originally stood for Java graphical extensions, not the colloquial Java game experts. Founder Andrew Gower built a graphical engine capable of what looked like rudimentary 3D in the browser by throwing away the Java framework and writing his own object model, because the standard one was too slow for real-time graphics.

  • Vohra designed quests and content for RuneScape players at Jagex
  • RuneScape was browser-based, not Flash — it was Java
  • Jagex = Java graphical extensions (the colloquial reading was Java game experts)
  • Andrew Gower discarded Java's object model and wrote his own for speed
  • Running in every school library browser is what built the user base

“The very original technical definition was Java graphical extensions.”

“I'm going to create my own object model in Java.”

#runescape#jagex#game engines#browser tech
Story

The Lamborghini Canyon Runs That Defined Flow for Him

After selling Reportive to LinkedIn, Vohra bought a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera as retail therapy and raced it in mountains and canyons rather than on tracks. He describes a speed at which you stop thinking in words because words are too slow, human and machine reach full synchrony, and every sense saturates. He calls it the most extreme flow he has ever experienced, and notes that flow distorts subjective time in both directions.

  • 570 horsepower, zero to sixty in under three seconds, naturally aspirated V10
  • Races were in mountains and canyons, not on tracks
  • At a certain speed thought stops being verbal
  • Time in flow either stretches out or flashes past — both are symptoms
  • Ben suggests the passage could be a Ford v Ferrari voiceover

“A speed where you stop thinking in words because words are too slow, because by the time you've had that thought, you're already around the…”

“Now, this is the most extreme flow I have ever experienced.”

#flow#cars#peak experience
Story

The Pizzeria Recruiting Rant That Won Superhuman Its CTO

Over pizza in South of Market, Vohra pitched his future co-founder and CTO with a single observation: programmers are the only profession that gets to build their own software, which is why they have the best tools in the world. The proposal was to take everything engineers take for granted — hundred-millisecond response times, instant search, command palettes, keyboard shortcuts, serious typography — and bring it to everyone else.

  • The rant that recruited Conrad Irwin, first employee at Reportive
  • Programmers write their own tools, so of course the tools feel like instruments
  • The pitch: do that for every other profession
  • Named specifics — 100ms responses, instant search, command palettes, shortcuts, typography
  • Explains why a productivity app can feel like flying over the keyboard

“Because we as programmers are the only profession in the world that gets to create our own software.”

“No wonder our fingers dance across the keyboard like we're playing a piano.”

#recruiting#founding story#product philosophy
Story

Using Game Design Lenses to Rent Out a Condo, Scents Included

Asked how the principles apply outside product roles, Vohra points at his own rental property. He runs prospective tenants' visits through the same lenses: what is their goal, what emotion should they feel, and how do you hit every sense as they walk in. The concrete tactic, picked up from sales books in his early twenties, is scent — vanilla in the kitchen to evoke childhood baking, lavender in the lounge to evoke a meadow.

  • The lenses describe experience design, not software specifically
  • Applies goals, emotions, controls, toys and flow to a property viewing
  • Deliberately designs for sight, sound, touch and smell
  • Vanilla in the kitchen evokes memories of baked goods
  • Lavender in the lounge evokes a meadow or somewhere relaxing
  • Learned the scent trick from sales books in his early twenties

“I think about the experience of prospective tenants coming to look at my condo through these lenses of game design.”

“I would put a vanilla scent in the kitchen to evoke memories of baked goods”

#experience design#sales#real estate#senses

Tool· 1

Tool

Superhuman's Streaks and Achievements Feature, Revealed on the Show

Vohra breaks news on the episode: Superhuman is days away from shipping a streaks feature. It celebrates hitting inbox zero and counts up every week you hit it, with an achievements area showing your all-time streak plus lifetime statistics like emails archived and sent. He explicitly models the achievements dialogue on World of Warcraft.

  • Streaks count every week you reach inbox zero
  • An achievements area holds all-time streak and lifetime stats
  • Stats include how many emails you have archived and sent in total
  • Modelled on the World of Warcraft achievements dialogue
  • Deliberately not the point of the product — a layer of depth and curiosity

“We are working on a streaks feature that should be out uh either next week or the week after, just a few final polishing touches…”

“Now it's not the point of superhuman, but it's there and it adds this rich layer of depth and texture that will make the experience…”

#superhuman#product launch#streaks#inbox zero

Takeaway· 1

Takeaway

The Founder Who Never Hit Inbox Zero Missed His Product's Best Moment

Vohra offers this as a clean case of his intuition being wrong. Receiving thousands of emails a day and five or six a minute, he essentially never reached inbox zero before Split Inbox existed, so he had no idea it mattered. It took roughly nine months of talking to early customers to learn that inbox zero was one of the most emotionally resonant moments in a person's relationship with their inbox.

  • He received thousands of emails a day, five or six per minute at peak
  • Inbox zero was personally impossible for him before Split Inbox
  • Took about nine months of customer contact to spot the moment
  • Founder intuition failed precisely where he lacked the user's experience
  • The insight came from interacting with the earliest customers

“And this is actually a good example of where my intuition was wrong.”

“as a founder starting the company, I so rarely hit inbox zero. I receive thousands of emails every single day.”

#customer research#founder intuition#inbox zero